It’s Your Last Chance To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

We are coming down to the final stretch and we need you to take a few minutes and participate in the IBM i Marketplace Survey that has been done for the past several years by HelpSystems. The survey takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.

The community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior, and Big Blue is more open about this process than many IT suppliers even if it might not feel like it sometimes. So this is your chance to provide some feedback and add some insight and pressure.

Moreover, IBM doesn’t provide much insight into how the Power Systems business is doing, much less the IBM i platform within it, so we have learned to rely on surveys by user groups and by the major software vendors in the community to try to figure out what is going on out there in IBM i Land.

For the past several years each fall, HelpSystems, probably now the biggest software house in the IBM i arena, has tried to fill in the gap of information that is no longer available from Big Blue or the major IT market researchers and to poll the IBM i customer base and put together an annual report, called the IBM i Marketplace Survey. In the winter of the new year, then HelpSystems hosts a set of webinars spanning different time zones to have people in the know and also myself comment on the results in each annual survey and discuss the trends over time in relation to what is happening in the broader IT market. (That’s where I usually pipe up.)

This survey is an important one, and that is why IT Jungle has always encouraged readers of The Four Hundred to participate in the annual survey put together by HelpSystems. So, in that spirit, I am asking you once again to spend a little time and play 30 questions with the 2018 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which opened up a few weeks ago and which closes on October 31. (We will find out if there is a trick or a treat, I suppose.)

The current plan is for Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, to host the webinars going over the results of the survey on January 17, 2019, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill and Ian Jarman – to talk it all out. So go answer some questions and give us something to talk about!

Thanks for helping out. We all appreciate it. And I mean all 300,000 to 400,000 of us in the IBM i community.

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